how many ways so imprecise a question could be misinterpreted, but El’hassai seemed to grasp my meaning well enough.
‘This is the last transmission from an exploration vessel, lost in the Coreward Marches[35] a little less than two cyr ago.’
‘About eighteen months,’ Donali murmured, for the benefit of those of us unfamiliar with the tau calendar. ‘Twenty at the most.’
‘And you’ve only just got it?’ I asked, trying not to sound too sceptical.
El’hassai nodded, a gesture he seemed to have picked up from his prolonged contact with humans[36]; I remembered him doing the same thing on Gravalax. ‘The vessel launched a courier drone[37] shortly before it was destroyed,’ he said. ‘The images you’re seeing now were uploaded to it in real time.’
I watched with horrified fascination as innumerable tiny pustules swelled up on the body of the bloated horror beneath us, then burst, spewing clouds of spinning organisms into the void. Thousands upon thousands of them, their hardened carapaces protecting them from the cold and vacuum of space, fangs and talons and bioweapons poised for massacre. I’d faced innumerable horrors spawned from the tyranid hive fleets myself, but never anything so hideous as these: half warrior, half boarding pod, all implacable killing machine. Some were carrying creatures I recognised – genestealers, termagants and raveners for the most part, encysted behind semi-transparent membranes – while others seemed to be more than sufficiently lethal on their own accounts.
‘Why don’t they just fire the main engines?’ I asked; if I’d been the tau captain I’d be halfway to the Ghoul Stars by now.
‘According to the telemetry recovered, the engines were at full power by this point,’ El’hassai said soberly. ‘We conjecture that the vessel had been immobilised in some fashion; the stresses on the hull would be consistent with constricting tentacles or gripping claws.’
Zyvan nodded. ‘Seen that a few times,’ he agreed. ‘They ram a ship, latch on, and send in the killers.’
The onrushing swarm was filling the hololith by now, each detail more ghastly than the last, and I must confess to a feeling of relief as the image finally disappeared in a burst of static.
‘At this point,’ El’hassai said evenly, ‘we believe the main reactor overloaded, although there is no way to tell if this was deliberate, or how much damage the explosion inflicted on the leviathan. We may hope that it was sufficient to kill or cripple the hive ship, but in any event, many of the swarm will have survived.’
‘And become aware of the presence of prey,’ Zyvan said.
‘Precisely,’ El’hassai agreed. He did something to the projection controls and a fresh image appeared, a star map studded with familiar constellations. Little icons popped up, marking Imperial, tau, and unclaimed worlds; although it went without saying that their idea of these categories didn’t entirely coincide with ours. This was hardly the time to reopen old quarrels, though, so I refrained from saying anything, although I was pretty sure I could hear Zyvan’s teeth grinding. ‘The message drone was recovered here,’ a fresh icon appeared well within the boarders of the Tau Empire, ‘last kai’rotaa–’
‘About two months back,’ Donali murmured quietly.
El’hassai continued speaking, as if unaware of the comment. ‘–and our preliminary analysis of its data places the encounter with the tyranid fleet somewhere around here,’ he concluded.
Another icon appeared, and Zyvan shook his head in perplexity. ‘That can’t be right,’ he said. ‘The main tyranid incursions are coming in from the Rim[38].’
‘They have done until now,’ I said, my eye falling on the marker pinpointing Nusquam Fundumentibus. The dormant brood we’d discovered there had to have come from somewhere, and the fleet the tau had blundered into certainly seemed close enough to have sent out a scouting party several millennia ago. ‘But it wouldn’t be the first time an isolated splinter fleet popped up without warning.’
‘Our experience also,’ El’hassai agreed. ‘In view of the evident risk, we sent scout vessels to backtrack the message drone, and found that the tyranids have indeed altered their course.’ A line began to extend from the point where the luckless explorator crew had first encountered the hive fleet, towards the position of the drone’s recovery.
‘They followed it,’ I said heavily, the coin dropping. Which was hardly surprising; the tau had done pretty much everything they could to attract the ’nids short of handing them a menu and a map.
‘They did,’ El’hassai confirmed. Another icon flared. ‘The scout fleet encountered them here, and engaged a few of the outlying bioships before being forced to withdraw. If